Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The Finch Report: UCL’s David Price Responds

The
much-awaited report from the
Finch Committee was published today. The Committee, headed up by Dame Janet Finch, a
sociologist at the University of Manchester, was set up last year by UK Minister
for Universities and Science David Willetts, and tasked
with establishing how access to research could be expanded.

David Price, UCL Vice-Provost (Research)

The
good news:
the Report recommends that all publicly funded research should be made freely available
on an Open Access (OA) basis, and that
the traditional model — which currently sees much research locked behind a subscription
paywall — should be phased out.

The
bad news:
the Report estimates that this will require the higher education sector to find
an extra £50-60 million a year to disseminate its research.

The
bulk of this extra money will be needed in order to pay for researchers to
publish in so-called Gold OA and Hybrid OA journals.
Instead of billing readers for access to research papers, as subscription
journals do, OA journals bill authors, or their funders or institutions, for
publishing papers — by means of article-processing
charges (APCs).

These
charges range from $305 to $3,930 per article, and
are the price publishers demand for making research papers freely available on the
Internet.

Some
have greeted the Report with enthusiasm. Sir Mark
Walport,
Director of the Wellcome Trust, the world's
second largest private funder, commented. “We are
delighted that the Finch Report encourages the UK to embrace open access,
something that we at the Wellcome Trust feel very strongly about. There is a
real groundswell of opinion in support of open access in the UK, the USA,
Europe and beyond and this is a real opportunity for the UK to lead the way.”

Others
are far less enthusiastic, arguing that by failing to support and promote Green OA (aka self-archiving), the Committee
missed an important opportunity to push for a more cost-effective solution.

With
Green OA, authors continue to publish in subscription journals (without payment),
but make their papers freely available on the Internet by self-archiving them in
an institutional
repository
— usually after an embargo period intended to allow the publisher to recoup the
publication costs through the subscription.

Many
OA advocates believe that Green OA is a much less costly route to OA. Publishers
dislike it intensely.

A hard place

“The
Finch Report is a successful case of lobbying by publishers to protect the
interests of publishing at the expense of the interests of research and the
public that funds research,” arguesUniversity of Southampton cognitive
scientist Stevan Harnad. “The Finch
Report proposes doing precisely what the US Research Works Act (RWA) — since
discredited and withdrawn — failed to do: to push ‘Green’ OA self-archiving (by
authors, and Green OA self-archiving mandates by authors’ funders and
institutions) off the UK policy agenda as inadequate and ineffective and, to
boot, likely to destroy both publishing and peer review — and to replace them
instead with a vague, slow evolution toward ‘Gold’ OA publishing, at the
publishers’ pace and price.”

Whatever
one’s views about the conclusions reached by the Finch Committee, and whatever one feels about the relative
merits of Green and Gold OA (see here for
instance), if the Report’s recommendations are implemented it will put UK universities
in a hard place. For it is they who will have to find much of the extra money
needed, at a time when their budgets are already under huge pressure.

Unsurprisingly,
therefore the Vice-Provost (Research) at University College London (UCL) David Price is not best pleased.
“The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems
with extra expense,” he told me. “Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of
access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

Price’s
message to David Willetts is simple: more work needs to be done to find an
adequate solution. “Listen to UCL’s response to Finch and carry on talking to
get the best transitional model from where we are now to a fully OA world,” he
suggests. “The Finch recommendations are only part of the answer.”

For
more of Price’s views read on.

Q&A with David Price

RP: Did UCL have a
representative on the Finch Committee?

DP:No, but we did submit
recommendations, and I was asked to comment on a draft.

RP: So was UCL
represented by a national university body then?

DP: We
were not “represented”, but Adam
Tickell, Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Birmingham, was on the
Committee and he kept Russell Group
HEIs in the loop.

RP: Would it be
accurate to say that you support the principle of Open Access, but you have
reservations about the recommendations in the Finch Report?

DP:
Yes, that is correct.

RP: What (from your
perspective) are the most significant recommendations made in the Report?

DP:The one which would have the most
effect is that for a move to Gold OA.

RP: This is the recommendation
that Gold OA become the “main vehicle” for the publication of research?

DP:
Yes. Economic modelling shows that, for research universities, the Green route
to OA is more cost effective than the Gold. Under Gold Research Councils and
Universities will have to find millions of pounds in existing budgets to fund
OA charges. That means that some things will have to stop to make the necessary
monies available.

Financial implications

RP: So if the Gold OA recommendation is implemented what exactly
would be the financial implications for UCL?

DP:
UCL would have to re-model existing budgets to find the monies to fund APCs,
where the researcher is not funded by a research grant. Modelling by economic
experts shows that this is millions of pounds.

RP: What budgets do
you anticipate would have to be cut in order to find the extra money?

DP: No consideration has been given to this question.

RP: Would the impact
on the humanities be different from the impact on the sciences?

DP: Yes.
The Finch recommendations are not good news for the Humanities, whose unit of
publication is characteristically the research monograph. Who will publish Gold
OA monographs, and who will pay for them?

RP: Can you clarify where the
extra expense will come from: is it that universities will find they have (for
a period of time at least) to pay both subscriptions and APCs? What OA
advocates call “double
dipping”?

DP: Unless subscription prices come down as Gold OA fees
are paid, then Universities will have
to pay twice — to help cover Gold OA APCs and for subscription to the journal.

RP: Publishers are
claiming (e.g. here)
that the Finch Report could destroy a £1billion industry that employs 10,000
people here and in its overseas operations. How does that claim square with
your belief that universities would end up paying publishers more?

DP: No
comment, as UCL has not seen the evidence which the publishers would use to
back their claim.

RP: Do you think you are
in a minority in your concerns about the Finch Report, or are most UK
universities, or at least other Russell Group universities, likely to be similarly
concerned?

DP:
Most Russell Group Universities will have the same concerns, because we all
face the same challenges.

RP: To get back to
basics for a minute, what is the problem that OA is intended to solve?

DP:
The problem is that researchers can find material on the Internet, but not
necessarily access the full-text.

RP: You feel the Finch
recommendations fall short of addressing this problem?

DP: The result of the Finch recommendations would be to
cripple university systems with extra expense. Finch is certainly a cure to the
problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the
disease?

Different scenario

RP: An OA advocate said to me, “Every which way to provide
access is recommended in the Finch Report (at additional cost to the UK) except
the solution we have been promoting for the past decade or so — Open Access.” I
assumed they meant Green OA. Would it have made more sense for the Finch Committee
to recommend that Green OA become the main vehicle for achieving OA?

DP:
What Finch should have done is to model Green and Gold together, to see which
works out cheaper. A forthcoming report from the JISC’sOpen
Access Implementation Group on the impact of APC charges on universities
does this — and comes up with a different scenario to Finch.

RP: One thing that puzzles me is that UCL and the other
Russell Group universities have in recent years invested a significant amount
of money in institutional repositories to support Green OA; and they have
introduced policies to promote self-archiving. As a result, these repositories
have provided almost all the UK’s OA literature to date. Yet the Finch Report
appears to be recommending that they now be consigned to a role of providing
access to data and grey literature only, and for preservation. Has the Finch
study overlooked or ignored the investments made in repositories, and the role
that they could play in providing OA do you think?

DP: Yes.
Repositories can indeed be used for marketing, and to promote grey literature —
reports, theses. But there is a scenario where they can carry the whole of a
university’s research output and make that available in OA at a fraction of the
cost of Gold OA.

National licensing

RP: Why do you think
the Finch Committee came up with the recommendations it did? Do you feel it
understood the issues adequately?

DP: UCL is keen to promote the idea of a true national license.
Finch goes part of the way to address this for various sectors — but this is
not a true national license. Finch says that a fully national license for
commercial content would be too expensive. But where is the economic modelling
to prove this? Finch provides none. So it is a missed opportunity, as national
licensing is a transitional step to an OA world.

RP: How would the national licensing model you refer to work? It might
seem to imply some form of “big
deal” arrangement. Is that correct?

DP: National licences are the preferred way forward in
the immediate future for many Russell Group Universities. They exist in other
European countries. For an agreed amount, publishers allow access to their
content by all sectors in society. UCL sees this as a transition step to full
Open Access. Initial discussions suggest that the cost of national licensing
would be cheaper than the Gold OA Finch is recommending.

RP: Many OA advocates maintain that open access
is a much cheaper way of publishing research, and so promises financial savings
for universities. Might it be that the cost increases you anticipate from the
Finch Report would be only transitional, and that in the long run universities
would realise significant financial gains? Indeed, I think this is what the
Finch Report anticipates. No gain without pain perhaps?

DP: Economic modelling does show significant savings in
the whole publishing system if the whole world were 100% OA. But these savings
fall in different parts of the system, not necessarily on University budgets.
In the current economic climate, Universities have to look their position in the
short term, as well as the long.

Only part of the answer

RP: What do you think those who disagree with the Finch recommendations
can/should do? Will you be formally registering your personal objections?

DP:
UCL will make its position clear in a number of fora — the Russell Group, in
news briefings such as this one.

RP: Do you expect that the recommendations will eventually be
implemented, whatever objections might be raised by the research community?

DP:
UCL expects an honest and open debate, where the weaknesses in the present
recommendations can be laid bare.

RP: Might the Finch Report
have the effect of souring the research community’s appetite for OA?

DP:
Yes, in certain areas.

RP: What is your
message to the man who set up the Finch Committee, David Willetts?

DP:
Listen to UCL’s response to Finch and carry on talking to get the best
transitional model from where we are now to a fully OA world. The Finch
recommendations are only part of the answer.

5 comments:

It is very unfortunate that the UK librarians killed a national licence, which was in place for the original Big Deal between 1996 and 1999, under the auspices of HEFCE, on the grounds that it meant top-slicing of their acquisition budgets and a threat to their autonomy. They preferred to pay more for less as long as they kept their autonomy. The idea of a national licence should be resurrected.

THE FINCH "CURE" FOR OPEN ACCESS IS NOT JUST WORSE THAN THE DISEASE: IT IS NOT EVEN A CURE

Professor Price, with whom I would agree on everything else he says above, says "“Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

The Finch "cure" -- which is to pay 50-60 million pounds per year in order to make UK research output OA -- is certainly not a cure for either the UK's access problem or the rest of the world's. It would just be an extremely expensive way of providing OA to the UK's research output (if suitable Gold OA journals could be found for all UK research output) for the rest of the world.

Optimizing and extending the UK's existing university and funder Green OA mandates would have the same effect, but at no cost, and with the added benefit that -- unlike pre-emptive Gold profligacy on the part of the UK -- it would be a model that the rest of the world could afford to emulate, thereby providing the OA input for the UK that funding Gold OA for UK output certainly does not do.

How on earth did the Finch report come up with such an obviously incoherent and ineffectual set of recommendations?

And is the UK's historic lead in OA now going to be squandered in this ignominious (and expensive) way?

David Price is absolutely correct in his comments. The Finch Report claims to be evidence-based but provides no evidence for the central conclusion that priority should be given to "gold" OA. As a taxpayer I object to paying extra for OA simply to protect the dominant position of a small number of huge publishers. The "green" route has been demonstrated as cost-effective and is unfairly represented in the Finch Report. Fred Friend

"The Finch recommendations are not good news for the Humanities, whose unit of publication is characteristically the research monograph. Who will publish Gold OA monographs, and who will pay for them?" It needs to be recognized both that OA monograph publishing experiments are already under way in the humanities, with mixed results, and that there are ways of moving forward in this area without sanctioning Green OA for monographs (which publishers are likely to resist mightily, especially given the new enthusiasm librarians have for patron-driven acquisitions as a model for collection development) and without going into a full Gold OA mode either. I develop some ideas along these lines in my 2011 essay "Back to the Future" available here:http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html

Let me be the devil's advocate. Does Green OA not mean that publishing industry establishes the hierarchy of a particular piece of research in the academic output world and universities then use that "impact" to establish their credentials? Once universities have done that, they then make the research available to everybody for free. Why would these elite publishers then continue to have their elaborate hierarchy of peer reviewers across the hierarchy of journals? Who would then pay to read their articles? I am not suggesting that we do not reform the system. But so long as we rely on this system of impact factors to decide academic fates, we will need all these journals to establish that academic hierarchy. Publishing information in this day and age is not a problem at all and actually very cheap. Costs really come from publishing information after peer review of varying rigour across the spectrum of journals available. So long as the scientific community continues to insist on this, we will not be able to find a lasting solution to this problem. True Green OA would mean scientists can put data and manuscripts on the web and in repositories without any prior peer review and databases like PubMed include that information to provide it visibility. Establishing the true "impact" of a piece of research published in this manner is where the true challenges lie and if we can develop a fair mechanism to do that, we might get closer to solving the issues of cost and access in publication of academic literature.